When he joined the Ohio University faculty in 2015, engineering professor Sumit Sharma found a new application for his expertise in molecular modeling and simulations: understanding pipeline corrosion.
The university’s Institute for Corrosion and Multiphase Technology investigates the causes of—and solutions for—this costly problem for the oil and gas industry. Although energy companies had been adding corrosion inhibitors to pipelines, the industry wanted to learn more about how the inhibitors work at the molecular level, Sharma explains.
Corrosion inhibitors are surfactants, or substances, that adhere to the interfaces of oil and water or metal and water. Drawing on his expertise with modeling surfactant behavior, Sharma’s research group is developing new tools that can predict how these molecules will adhere to the surface of the metal pipelines. The models help pipeline engineers understand how changing the chemical makeup of the corrosion inhibitors leads to changes in their effectiveness in the field.
Understanding the workings of corrosion inhibitors can help reduce unforeseen corrosion-related failures of pipelines, which previously have been linked to numerous accidents that have resulted in the loss of lives, injuries, and significant environmental damage, Sharms explains.
“We are working on solving practical engineering problems by studying the underlying basic science that various industries can use, and the use goes beyond the systems that we are studying,” Sharma says.
Because molecules can very densely pack themselves on surfaces, the researchers needed high-performance computing power to obtain a close, detailed look at their behavior. Ohio University pointed Sharma to the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) in Columbus, Ohio, USA, which he uses for molecular simulations. These high-performance simulations consume more than a million CPU hours per year.
Sharma has two grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which allows him to also make use of the federal agency’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment computing services to advance his work.
The researcher plans to continue using these various supercomputing resources to tackle other molecular modeling and simulation challenges. Sharma is currently studying how surfactants interface with metallic nanoparticles, which may be used in bioimaging and drug delivery in the human body. Adding surfactants to the nanoparticles can prompt them to form certain shapes that make them useful for applications such as invading and killing cancer cells, he explains.
The NSF awarded Sharma a prestigious five-year Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant to support metallic nanoparticles work in 2021.
Source: OSC, www.osc.edu.